I do not think UML has died. Is it not uncommon these days to see UML sequence diagrams, for example... I would describe the situation as: - UML offers a lot

I do not think UML has died. Is it not uncommon these days to see UML sequence diagrams, for example... I would describe the situation as: - UML offers a lot of stuff, but only some of that became widely adopted. - When stuff gets really ugly and complicated, UML can help by providing a high level view of what's going on in ways that are really hard to achieve just from memory. Sometimes I use PlantUML to create diagrams to keep track of things. PlantUML is a format that is source control friendly, so I can check it in my docs folder.